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Biography
Taylor was born in Northern California. She did her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College, graduating summa cum laude with an A.B. in 1966. She began her graduate studies in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, but after receiving an M.Sc. she switched to mathematics under the mentorship of Shiing-Shen Chern and then transferred to the University of Warwick and received a second M.Sc. in mathematics there. She completed a doctorate in 1973 from Princeton University under the supervision of Frederick J. Almgren, Jr.
Taylor joined the Rutgers faculty in 1973, and retired in 2002. She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1999 to 2001.
She has been married three times, to mathematicians John Guckenheimer and Frederick Almgren, and to financier and science advocate William T. Golden.
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Research
Taylor is known for her work on the mathematics of soap bubbles and of the growth of crystals. In 1973 she published her dissertation on "Regularity of the Singular Set of Two-Dimensional Area-Minimizing Flat Chains Modulo 3 in R3" which solved a long-standing problem about length and smoothness of soap-film triple function curves. In 1976 she, along with Almgren, published the first proof of Plateau's laws, a description of the shapes formed by soap bubble clusters that had been formulated without proof in the 19th century by Joseph Plateau. Encyclopedia Britannica called the mathematical derivation "one of the major triumphs of global analysis".